A Chinese Babbitt

ON THE WISDOM OF AMERICA (462 pp.) --Lin Yufang--John Day ($5).

After more than ten years in the U.S., writing about China, Philosopher Lin Yutang settled down on the French Riviera last year to explore the mysteries of America. A glamorous, not to say exotic, figure when dishing out pearls of wisdom from the mysterious East, Philosopher Lin is a little like a peddler dealing out secondhand clothes when he begins thumbing through a Western library.

Picking up where he left off in The Importance of Living, Lin sets out to compile an anthology of American profundities. Instead, he shows a rare gift for finding the kind of quotation from the great and near-great which seems more suited to an inspirational guide for speakers at businessmen's luncheons. He quotes Pearl Buck on idle U.S. women: "Work is the one supreme privilege which . . . will really make them free." And Emerson at his wowserish worst: "Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium."

Though some readers are likely to be flattered and delighted to find that what they have always admired is indeed America's deepest wisdom, many will put the book down with the feeling they are being fobbed off with the obvious and the sententious. The biggest giveaway is Lin's acceptance of the late Ray Stannard Baker in his role--under the pen name David Grayson--of a horny-handed outdoor man.

This shrewd journalist and Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer (Woodrow Wilson) in his peasant disguise is quoted more often than Lincoln. Santayana and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and just about as often as Franklin and Thoreau. Not many U.S. workers would go along with Grayson-Baker's ideas of the simple life: "Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and homemade bread--there may be--."

Too much of this sort of homespun philosophy--and an attack on Walt Whitman as a dirty-minded fellow--makes it pretty clear that Philosopher Lin Yutang is not the best man to evaluate the wisdom of America. Along with his own running commentary, he has gotten together a narcotic collection of bromides from reputable pens; if it proves anything, it proves only that a bromide looks a lot better clothed in a mandarin coat than it does in a Palm Beach suit.

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